Yeltsin Takes Control

...When Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in 1799 he is supposed to have said, "The French cannot be ruled—except by me...

...But they should not be surprised at his rule by decree, his suppression of parties and newspapers that he considers extremist, and his attempts to bring local governments to heel...

...On the other hand to secure total control without resorting to the military and risking a confrontation, he would have to work long and patiently through a strictly political process—and that would be out of character for him...

...Conceivably, quiet persuasion by the United States and other Western governments might yet nudge Yeltsin in that direction...

...After the April referendum endorsing the President and his policies, the pro-Yeltsin deputies largely boycotted Parliament...

...Apparently they realized that their sole option was to try to hold him to account under the terms of the existing Constitution...

...Thanks to the 48-hour historical perspective of most of the American media, the impression has taken hold that the events of October 3 and 4 in Moscow were an unprovoked uprising of Left and Right zealots bent on restoring Communism...

...After singing the praises of Boris N. Yeltsin all through the Moscow crises of March-April and September-October, some American leaders and media commentators are beginning to have second thoughts about the Russian President's authoritarian proclivities...

...This is precisely what the Yeltsin camp is doing, possibly in preparation for a show trial of the alleged conspirators on the eve of the December election...

...The steps he has taken since ousting the Parliament and its supporters, however, have cast a pall of doubt over such an outcome...

...The pro-Parliament riots were clearly organized by Communist and nationalist die-hards, although exactly what they expected to accomplish is not clear...

...Even if the promised elections are held on schedule, Yeltsin will be exercising untrammeled power to set the rules...

...In fact, Parliament contained perhaps 20 per cent Communist ideologues and ultranationalists, 20 per cent unwavering in an unsteady center...

...For example, in Karelia (one of the "republics" based on an ethnic minority) politics are generally moderate...

...Yeltsin may have felt that if he allowed Parliament to extend its defiance after the October 3 riots, his own authority and his chances of turning to the military might evaporate...

...Rutskoi has been seen as a well-meaning but naive military man who could never reconcile himself to the breakup of the Soviet Union, and who therefore, like Khasbulatov, found sympathy mostly among the Red-Brown extremists...

...The potentially most destabilizing problem in Russia now concerns Moscow's relations with the provinces...

...It is indeed true, as his apologists argue, that Yeltsin's only choice on October 4 was to subdue the parliamentarians—but he had no other choice because he had already decided on September 21 to assume the powers of a dictator by closing down the Parliament...

...Most Western spokesmen still cling to the hope that Yeltsin does believe in democracy and will abide by his promises of free elections both for a new Parliament in December and for president next June...

...On October 3 Yeltsin's lieutenants were caught by surprise, with their chief away from the capital closeted at his dacha...

...Rutskoi was his choice to run for Vice President on the same ticket with him in 1990...

...and yet another was his response to the October riots...

...Khasbulatov was his choice to succeed him as Chairman of the Russian Parliament when he moved up to the new presidency...

...Yeltsin's popularity had been falling during the summer, and his decree against Parliament had shaken up defenders of constitutionalism and provincial rights all over the country...

...If so...

...They are guilty at least of imagining on the spot that they were going to overthrow Yeltsin...

...Further, this school scorns the existing Constitution and the banished Parliament as remnants of Leonid I. Brezhnev's regime—when of course the old Communist Supreme Soviet was a rubber stamp with no power to oppose anyone, and the Parliament was the same one that chose Yeltsin to be its first chairman after it was elected in 1990...

...but the more apt precedent for him and his entourage is Peter Stolypin, the Prime Minister under Tsar Nicholas II...

...The Russians have no real understanding of the delimitation of powers between the federal government and the states...

...Yeltsinite propagandists and most of the American media represent them as hard-line conspirators trying to turn the clock back to Soviet times...

...Yet one may reasonably suspect Yeltsin is the kind of politician who believes his own rationalizations, and that is more dangerous...

...He understands the psychological essence of power, which like beauty lies primarily in the eyes of the beholder...

...Parliament soon officially gave him the authority to take these steps, but withdrew it in December 1992...

...And he has decreed a constitutional referendum on the same date—December 12—Parliament is to be elected, without actually having a text ready...

...Western assessments of Russia's President have been colored by what might be called —to paraphrase the title of Leon Trotsky's famous book about Stalin?The Yeltsin School of Falsification...

...Should it balk somewhere down the line, he will have the powers written into the new constitution that he used unconstitutionally against the old Parliament—that is, to dissolve the legislative branch and declare a state of emergency...

...But Yeltsin failed to seek a consensus with the pragmatic majority...

...The center crumbled as Yeltsin and Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov put the squeeze on it...

...His new book is The End of the Communist Revolution, just published by Routledge...

...In such confused and fast-moving situations, it is often very difficult to sort out intentions and results, or to fix the blame for the first shot...

...But the legislators remaining in the White House (i.e...

...The Parliament was said to be the "hard-line" Communist holdover and the source of an antidemocratic conspiracy...

...How Yeltsin will deal with this kind of noncompliance without losing the mystique of power, above all in the non-Russian minority republics, is anybody's guess...

...it will allow the President to dissolve Parliament, to call referendums, and to appoint cabinet ministers and military commanders without any legislative confirmation...

...Yeltsin's record of relations with the institutions of representative government shows that his dismissal of the Russian Parliament and his "temporary" assumption of absolute power were perfectly predictable...

...Instead, he polarized Russian politics with a stubborn defense of his presidential prerogative and economic shock therapy, leading up to the crisis of last March that was the curtain-raiser to the October imbroglio...

...another, in March of this year, was his snatching victory from the jaws of defeat by transforming a near-impeachment into a television triumph with a crowd of his supporters...

...But the republic's Supreme Soviet voted to protest Yeltsin's dismissal of the central Parliament, then refused to put the question of dissolving itself on the agenda, and finally set new elections for July 1994, long after Yeltsin's deadline...

...To Yeltsin and his central government, federalism means they can appoint local officials and control all their actions, thereby virtually reducing the provinces to the administrative subdivisions they were under the Communists...

...Not surprisingly, he is being met with resistance...

...It ignores all the in-between people who have their reservations about the President...

...Yet judging from the full picture of what happened that has filtered through Yeltsin's censorship, the brief illusions of the parliamentary opposition may not have been so unfounded as they now appear...

...The generals, they suggest, might rebel against him if he tried to use the Armed Forces for that purpose...

...Yeltsin was faulted simply for using excessive force to put down the rebellion, or else for not getting rid of his enemies sooner...

...One such moment was the August putsch...

...Yeltsin waves the banner of Peter the Great, of all people (Stalin's role model, too...

...He has decided that the new Parliament or "Federal Assembly" will consist of a "Council of the Federation" and a "State Duma...

...It is relatively easy, though, to look back at the events and impose more logic on them than was really operative...

...The great irony of October 3-4 is that the strongest defenders of the principle of constitutionalism—for their own purposes, to be sure—were the extremists of the Left and Right...

...They included, for instance, Oleg Rumiantsev, the respected young leader of the Social Democratic Party and secretary of the legislative-executive Constitutional Commission that produced a draft constitution last spring...

...To advance the campaign against the present institutions of local self-government, the school also demonizes the word "soviet" (which is merely Russian for "council") by lumping the revolutionary Soviets of 1917, the supine Soviets of the Communist era, and the recalcitrant Soviets of today all together as the same evil thing...

...To the provinces, federalism means they can override federal laws if they wish—rather like South Carolina during the nullification controversy before the Civil War...

...They neglect to note that these hapless leaders of the resistance in the White House were both creatures of Yeltsin himself...

...Presumably the new constitution will be some combination of the version that Yeltsin floated last June and the version his largely appointed Constitutional Conference recommended in July...

...Yeltsin, the Commission's official chairman, never attended a meeting and completely ignored the document it produced...

...They had no assurance that the military could be counted on until a high council of the generals decided early in the morning of October 4—after the opposition's impulsive attempt to seize the Ostankino TV studios—to go with Yeltsin...

...Parliament building) on October 3 and 4 were not all of the "Red-Brown" variety...

...Even then, it has been reported, only officers were trusted to man the tanks brought in to batter the White House into submission...

...There is thus far no evidence that prior to Yeltsin's dissolution of Parliament on September 21 Khasbulatov and Rutskoi attempted to arrange an armed coup against the President...

...There among the Red-Brown extremists...

...What of the President's two main enemies, Aleksandr V. Rutskoi and Khasbulatov...

...Given Yeltsin's full control and the limited time for tolerated opponents to organize and campaign, in all probability he will win on the constitution and his new party will deliver a Parliament ready to do his bidding...

...Since his relationship with the military remains uncertain, some observers wonder whether he can depend on the Army to bring unwilling republics and provinces into line...

...Immediately after the August putsch, without any legal authority, Yeltsin began appointing provincial governors plus "personal representatives" to oversee them...

...In the course of Parliament's standoff with Yeltsin over the last year and a half, Khasbulatov acquired the reputation of a power-hungry manipulator, even among pragmatists, leaving him mainly the nostalgic Communists and the ultranationalists as allies when the moment of truth arrived...

...Still, we should not overlook Boris Yeltsin's remarkable ability to move swiftly in times of crisis to turn events to his advantage...

...to press for the dissolution of provincial councils (that awful word "soviet" once more): and to decree the constitutional arrangements and election rules that will determine the restructuring of provincial and local governments...

...This represents recent Russian history as an either/or struggle between Yeltsin-style "democrats" and die-hard "Communist-Fascist" partisans of the old Soviet Union...

...There are Orwellian tones in the justifications we hear of Yeltsin's policies and his personal power-grab: dictatorship is democracy, centralism is federalism, misery is progress, Russian hegemony is national self-determination...

...In any case, as they watched a mob break through to the White House, Rutskoi, Khasbulatov and the other nerve-frazzled occupants of the blockaded building seem to have been momentarily carried away by the belief that they were witnessing a replay of the popular upsurge responsible for the defeat of the August 1991 coup...

...without waiting for the new constitution...

...It dismisses the vast (albeit incomplete) changes accomplished under Mikhail S. Gorbachev as simply an attempt to shore up the old system, though only Gorbachev's reforms gave Yeltsin his chance to rise to the top...

...He has already announced that "treasonous" parties and individuals, as he defines them, will not be allowed to participate in the voting, while launching his own semiofficial political organization, "Russia's Choice...

...he knows that you capture the perception of power by seeming to exercise it...

...At present Yeltsin is intervening on his own to remove governors who failed to support him in the September-October crisis...

...Nevertheless, Parliament was no monolith and it could not quite muster the two-thirds vote necessary to impeach the President at that point...

...He will be able on his own to suspend laws he dislikes and proclaim emergency rule or martial law...

...Yeltsin appears to believe the same of the Russians today...

...Their optimistic scenario has a Russian Charles de Gaulle surrendering the personal power he obtained in an anticonstitutional coup and submitting to the democratic rules of a new constitution...

...He dissolved the obstreperous Duma in 1907, changed the election rules, and secured a Duma whose majority remained submissive to the Court until the Revolution of 1917...